Swiss French Regional Accent Identification

In this paper an attempt is made to automatically recognize the speaker’s accent among regional Swiss French accents from four different regions of Switzerland, i.e. Geneva (GE), Martigny (MA), Neuchâtel (NE) and Nyon (NY). To achieve this goal, we rely on a generative probabilistic framework for classification based on Gaussian mixture modelling (GMM). Two different GMM-based algorithms are investigated: (1) the baseline technique of universal background modelling (UBM) followed by maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) adaptation, and (2) total variability (i-vector) modelling. Both systems perform well, with the i-vector-based system outperforming the baseline system, achieving a relative improvement of 15.3% in the overall regional accent identification accuracy.